The Netflix effect

Since this blog’s humble little following is consists of media and entertainment professionals, many may have bypassed Farhad Manjoo’s column, “Why Parallels Between Netflix and Amazon Should Worry Media Titans“in today’s New York Times. The first couple paragraphs come straight out of 2007. But if you stick with it, you’ll find some a pretty decent presentation of the situation big media finds itself in.

The parallels between Netflix and Amazon extend beyond the ostentatious aspirations of its founders.

On paper, Mr. Hastings’s plan to take on the traditional TV industry has long sounded slightly nutty, as delusional as Jeff Bezos’s strategy at Amazon to overrun retailing once seemed.

We know how that turned out for mall owners. Manjoo presents cases for both Netflix’s eventual dominance from bullish analysts and its potential to become just another mid-tier media company from Netflix skeptics. It all comes down to who ends up with pricing power.

Will producers be able to limit Netflix’s ascendency by maintaining high prices, thus preventing Netflix from stealing away traditional broadcast and cable viewers because Netflix will have to raise its subscription fees significantly?

Or will Netflix be so dominant that content producers will have to grant it pricing concessions?

The latter will be the case. It’s only a question of when that day comes. Put simply, it’s the day that the audience values the Netflix model above the traditional broadcast and cable model. No commercials. Binge watching. No need to set the DVR or pay TiVo to do it. The scenario is illustrated below. Once the Netflix model becomes the preferred model, as it already has to the fast growing cord cutter population, along with millennials who would never lease a cord to cut in the first place, it becomes the content owners’ most valuable distribution channel.

To those skeptics who believe broadcasters can go toe to toe against Netflix and come out ahead, I ask: Do you believe they will also emerge victorious against Amazon, Google, and Apple? Someone is going to break the old model.

For a much more in depth analysis of the future of television over IP, read Ken Auletta’s February 2014 New Yorker article on Netflix. In it he quotes Marc Andreessen, who co-invented Mosaic, the first commercial Internet browser.

“TV in ten years is going to be one hundred per cent streamed. On demand. Internet Protocol. Based on computers and based on software.” He said that the television industry has managed the transition to the digital age better than book publishers and music executives, but “software is going to eat television in the exact same way, ultimately, that software ate music and as it ate books.”

Even the Beatles surrendered to iTunes, and then again to Spotify because people were going to stop buying. Your content has to be where the audience wants it or they will live without. She may have crow’s feet by the time it happens, but Taylor Swift’s catalog will be available on Spotify someday.

Netflix customers may cheer this vision of the future, but as surely as night follows day when that moment comes, Netflix streaming will no longer cost them a paltry $8/month. Pricing power cuts both ways.